Relevant Materials for International Human Rights Committee's Teleconference on the CIA and the Use of Torture to Combat Terrorism

Please note the following materials of relevance to the upcoming teleconference on the CIA and the use of torture to combat terrorism:

• Stuart Taylor Jr., "Torture:  Stop Harassing the Lawyers," NationalJournal.com (Sept. 12, 2009) 
• Testimony of David Luban, Senate Judiciary Committee, Subcommittee on Administrative Oversight and the Courts, "What Went Wrong:  Torture and the Office of Legal Counsel in the Bush Administration" (May 13, 2009)
• Senate Armed Services Committee Inquiry into the Treatment of Detainees in U.S. Custody (Dec. 11, 2008)
• ICRC Report on the Treatment of Fourteen "High-Value Detainees" in CIA Custody (Feb. 2007)
• CIA Inspector General's Report on Counterterrorism Detention and Interrogation Activities (May 7, 2004; released Aug. 24, 2009)

Torture is Illegal, Immoral and Counterproductive

by Mike Pheneger, Colonel, US Army (Ret.), a participant in the International Human Rights Committee's teleconference on the CIA and the use of torture to combat terrorism

*Please click on the title of this post to read the post in its entirety.

I was stunned to learn that the United States government had authorized the torture of suspects captured during the War on Terror. I am not naïve. As a professional soldier, I know individuals captured by the US military have been abused in the past, but abuse usually occurs at the point of capture during or immediately after a fire-fight when tempers are hot and units have sustained casualties. Some prisoners were tortured, but this was an aberration not national policy. It is important that we ensure that the record of our involvement with torture is laid bare. That is the only way to ensure that we never again stride purposely and confidently down that dark path.

Our greatest presidents rejected torture and abuse. Washington refused to follow the British practice of torturing prisoners; he believed our new nation should be noted for its humanity. Lincoln believed that “military necessity shall not permit of cruelty.”

The Bush Administration abandoned our traditions and made a calculated decision to authorize torture as a matter of national policy. Immediately after 9/11, Vice President Cheney noted that we would have to go the “dark side” to counter the al-Qaeda threat. After 9/11, the administration “took the gloves off” and approved “harsh” interrogation techniques that individually and in combination amount to torture. Alberto Gonzales advised that Geneva Convention prohibitions against torturing and abusing prisoners did not apply to al-Qaeda and Taliban prisoners.

The torture policy and its “legal” justification were developed in secret by a small group of attorneys closely associated with the Vice President. They simply assumed that “harsh” interrogations would be necessary to obtain actionable intelligence. There is nothing in the public record to indicate that anyone with actual knowledge of or experience in interrogation participated in making the decision. Service Judge Advocates were frozen out of the process because they were considered “unreliable.” When Alberto Mora, then General Counsel of the US Navy, learned the Department of Defense was about to approve harsh interrogation methods, he brought his concerns to DoD General Counsel William Haynes. After unsuccessfully trying to bring Mora on board, Haynes froze him out of the process. The torture policies were not subject to the normal interagency coordination process that is designed to weed out really bad ideas.

IHRC to Host Free Teleconference: the CIA and the Use of Torture to Combat Terrorism

On Monday, October 26, from 12:30 to 2:00 p.m. EST, the International Human Rights Committee will host a free teleconference on the CIA and the use of torture to combat terrorism. The teleconference will discuss CIA interrogation tactics and whether they constitute torture, as well as the relationship between torture and the rule of law in the context of CIA liability.

Panel members for this teleconference include:

• Mike Pheneger: Mike Pheneger, Colonel, U.S. Army (Ret.), represents Florida on the ACLU's National Board and serves on the ACLU's National Executive Committee. Colonel Pheneger spent 30 years on active duty as a U.S. Army Intelligence Officer and served multiple Vietnam tours, retiring in 1993. He also served as an intelligence staff officer at the U.S. European Command and on the Army staff. He currently teaches courses on the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, terrorism, and geopolitical issues for the University of South Florida's Learning in Retirement Program. He holds a B.A. in History from Bowling Green State University (Ohio) and an M.P.A. from Shippensburg University in Pennsylvania. He is a graduate of the U.S. Army War College, the Command & Staff Course, U.S. Naval War College, and the Military Intelligence Officer's Advanced Course.

• Hina Shamsi: Hina Shamsi is Senior Advisor to the Project on Extrajudicial Executions at NYU School of Law. Previously, Ms. Shamsi was a Staff Attorney with the National Security Project of the American Civil Liberties Union. She is a graduate of Northwestern University School of Law and Mount Holyoke College.

• Stephen I. Vladeck: Stephen I. Vladeck is a Professor of Law at American University Washington College of Law, where his teaching and research focus on federal jurisdiction, national security law, constitutional law (especially the separation of powers), and international criminal law. Professor Vladeck was part of the legal team that successfully challenged the Bush Administration’s use of military tribunals at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, 548 U.S. 557 (2006), and has co-authored amicus briefs in a host of other lawsuits challenging the U.S. government’s surveillance and detention of terrorism suspects. Professor Vladeck earned a B.A. summa cum laude in History and Mathematics from Amherst College in 2001 and graduated from Yale Law School in 2004. He clerked for the Honorable Marsha S. Berzon on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit and the Honorable Rosemary Barkett on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit.

• Ben Wizner: Ben Wizner has been a staff attorney at the ACLU since 2001, specializing in national security, human rights, and first amendment issues. He has been involved in numerous post-9/11 civil liberties cases, including challenges to the CIA's extraordinary rendition program; lawsuits aimed at exposing FBI and Pentagon surveillance of non-violent protestors; and suits challenging unlawful airport security policies. He has traveled to Guantanamo Bay to observe and report on Military Commission trials. Wizner was a law clerk to the Honorable Stephen Reinhardt of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. He is a graduate of Harvard College and New York University School of Law.

To participate in the free teleconference, please use the following call-in information:

Dial-in Number: 1-219-509-8111

Participant Access Code: 153417

Participants who join the call are muted but may unmute themselves during the question and answer portion of the teleconference. It is important to remain on mute while not speaking to avoid complications with feedback. The teleconference is limited to 150 participants, so please join us early to ensure your participation.

Attacks in Mumbai

For more information on the attacks in Mumbai, see 

• Andy Barr, Politico, "Bush on Mumbai: Nothing but violence and hopelessness"; 
• BBC News, "Officials quit over India attacks"; 
• Mark Magnier, LA Times, "Mumbai residents try to return to routines"; 
• Damien McElroy, Telegraph, "Mumbai attacks: U.S. Intelligence warned India a strike from Pakistani group was planned";
• Bill Roggio, The Long War Journal "Captured Mumbai attacker implicates Pakistani military, intel"; 
• Matthew Weaver, Guardian, "Mumbai Attacks: 'It's war' declares Indian press."
  

Obsession: the West's War Against Islam

My sister sent me a link to a blog post with a first-hand account of an incident at a mosque in Dayton, Ohio. The first-hand account differs drastically in tone and content from an article in the Dayton Daily News covering the same incident. Although police concluded that there was no evidence of a “biased crime,” individuals within the mosque noted that the recent release of a DVD, Obsession: Radical Islam’s War Against the West, may have provoked the incident.

The Clarion Fund, a “non-profit, non-partisan” organization whose primary focus is “the most urgent threat of radical Islam,” engaged in a mass mailing of the DVD beginning on September 14, 2008. The group’s web page for the DVD touts that 28 million copies of the DVD have been distributed. The web site contains little information regarding the content of the DVD, but the imagery is strong. Emblazoned across the top of the screen is the DVD’s logo: the “O” of “Obsession” is the star and crescent symbol commonly associated with Islam, and the “n” is formed in part by a gun.

The DVD is viewable on YouTube. The DVD appears in ten six-minute video clips that must be watched individually. Although the DVD begins with a statement that not all Muslims are terrorists, it proceeds in broad generalizations to link Islam to terrorism and to compare Islam to Nazi Germany. One commentator goes so far as to note that the “war on terror” is “history repeating itself,” i.e., a failure to act tough in the war on terror will result tragedies akin to the Holocaust. The DVD includes a barrage of images of large groups of Muslims worshiping, calls by individual Muslims to attack the United States, and pictures of Arab children with guns. The images are terrorizing; they invoke panic and mistrust, and play on our fear of future attacks against the United States.

The most striking aspect of the DVD is its lack of specification; the DVD conflates terrorist groups and acts, and associates these groups and acts with one religion. At the beginning of the DVD, images of terrorist attacks abound. A map is filled with red dots demarcating the locations of terrorist attacks throughout the world. The red dots expand, seeping outward like blood. Nonetheless, there is no explanation of the groups who perpetrated these acts or the ideologies underlying their attacks. In fact, there is little by way of factual development throughout the DVD. Each attack is attributed to Islam without distinction.

Linking a religion to terrorism is dangerous and invites hate crimes, such as the incident at the mosque in Dayton. Making the war on terror synonymous with a “war against Islam” continues down a road that has threatened the rule of law in the United States. The war on terror is not a war in the traditional sense: there is no defined enemy, time limit, or rules that apply. Guantánamo is an example of the ways in which this limitless war has affected individuals from countries all over the world, some of whom have only the most attenuated ties to any wrongdoing. It is grievous error to engage in broadscale attacks that are not based on specified wrongdoing. In this manner “Obsession” and the Clarion Fund’s attacks against Islam commit the same mistakes of the Bush Administration and its war on terror. As a result, many innocent individuals are caught up in campaigns playing on racist and nationalist fear of "the other."